Plano’s Past: The Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum
“Liberoachi” exhibition at Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum. Photos courtesy of Michael Bohdan
From Plano Magazine: Until 2012, Plano was home to a unique attraction: the Cockroach Hall of Fame Museum.
“It is not the Smithsonian,” as owner Michael Bohdan liked to say – but it was an interesting enough oddity to merit appearances on “The Tonight Show” and “The View,” as well as mentions on websites like Atlas Obscura and Roadside America.
You had to know where to look for it. The museum was part of the Pest Shop, a small do-it-yourself shop that sold extermination products for getting rid of pests in your home – ants, mice, roaches, rats and more. (The shop is still located at the corner of Custer and 15th Street, under new ownership.)
Historic DTLA Garage Readies for Office Revamp
MAY COMPANY GARAGE PHOTO. HERBERT M. BARUCH CORP. CONSTRUCTORS/UCLA ARCHIVES
From Commercial Observer: Downtown Los Angeles’ years-long development boom is entering the new decade, and some original structures from a century ago are due for new and improved uses.
Markwood, an investment and development firm based in Beverly Hills, is bringing an adaptive reuse project into the mix at West Ninth and South Hill Streets in the Historic District. The firm is converting the historic parking garage, formerly known as the May Company Garage, into a modern office space.
The property at 914 South Hill Street was one of the nation’s first parking garages with about 200,000 square feet across nine levels, including three below-grade, designed by the iconic architecture team Curlett and Beelman.
A Roadside Motel on Las Vegas’s Historic Fremont Street Reopens as a Bustling Communal Space
Photos by Aimlee Photography
From Gray: Eight blocks beyond Las Vegas’s Fremont Street nightlife epicenter, Fergusons Downtown, a landmark motel-turned-community block, showcases a contrasting selection of locally inspired restaurants, pop-up yoga sessions, and a monthly makers market. This is the beginning of a new era for a site that continues to evolve alongside a historic district of Las Vegas.
First opened as the mission revival Franklin Motel by a family who lived on site more than seventy years ago, the midcentury traveler’s hub—later renamed Fergusons after changing hands in the ‘60s—sat vacant in recent years before reopening last winter as a vibrant mixed-use gathering space. This time with echoes of nostalgia.
This may be the strangest roadside attraction in America
From Aol: The strangest roadside attraction in America could be Nebraska’s Carhenge.
The site is a life-size replica of Britain’s Stonehenge that’s made entirely of vehicles!
According to the Carhenge website, 39 automobiles assume the same proportions as Stonehenge, with the circle measuring approximately 96-feet in diameter.
20 Sad Facts Behind America’s Abandoned Truck Stops
From TheThings.com: The truck stop as we know it was an invention of the 1940s, as more car and truck drivers were on the roads in the aftermath of World War II. This number only increased in the 1950s and 1960s, after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Interstate Highway Act in 1956, leading to the creation of 41,000 miles of new Interstate roads.
The 1970s saw the humble truck stop go through another seismic change, with the first chain business, Truckstops of America, opening its first premises in 1972. A further innovation followed soon afterward when Petro opened the first self-serve truck stop in 1975 in El Paso, Texas.